"You've Had Your Six!"

I think I’m done with FlashForward. It started with a really intriguing idea but, a half–dozen episodes in, it just seemed that the central premise was gradually being frittered away with each successive week, leaving a confused narrative going around in circles and chasing its own tail.

It’s a crying shame really because I love a good thriller that’ll keep me on my toes, and the more labyrinthine the better. But by the end of this week’s episode the show was descending into the realms of soap opera and even farce. While a few story crumbs have been tossed toward the plodding FBI investigation there never seemed to be enough happening to keep any kind of real momentum going.

The reason it hasn’t got off the ground is that for almost all these first six episodes – which is already the first quarter of the season – it felt like the writers had repeatedly got into a huddle to argue whether the far too broad selection of onscreen characters would believe in their visions or not and that carried across into the scripts. It felt strange that whereas it’s usually the audience who decides whether they are willing to suspend their disbelief or not, in this instance it seemed to be the programme makers having the doubts.

While they noodled around, weighing up the pros and cons rather than just getting on with telling the story, the relative inactivity leaves the audience with time on their hands for second thoughts. I quite liked the idea of the FBI guy appearing a little tired and emotional in his vision. Having the ex-booze hound back on the sauce helped make him an unreliable witness to the future events. But the more they kept banging on about it the more suspect it became.

Was it the babysitter who was being drowned by some bruiser in her vision? When she came to in the pilot episode I don’t remember her immediately struggling and gasping for breath, which suggests that for those couple of minutes she saw the future rather than experienced it. If that’s the case, wouldn’t it mean that even if the FBI man was in his cups in the future he would still be sober when he had the flash forward and therefore shouldn’t have a problem remembering it?

Either way I don’t really care anymore, but it was the failure to get the story moving that led me to dwell on what little information there was and scrutinize it for any potential flaws. That shouldn't even have been an issue, but as I’ve said earlier, I still think the major fault with FlashFoward was that it began with too much bash and crash and smash, spreading out amongst far too many characters too soon, rather than make some effort to start establishing the key players.

So there it is, FlashForward has had its six and that’s it for me. You have to figure something had gone horribly awry when the most entertaining scene so far involved a karaoke version of Sister Christian, while the most ludicrous was the underground garage shoot–out that took place almost immediately afterwards. With that sort of juxtaposition you can’t exactly accuse FlashForward of lacking in imagination. It’s a shame then that so far the show’s failing is that it simply lacks vision.